The exemplary embodiments relate to a method and system for specialty imaging effect generation using multiple layers in documents. In particular, a document (or file) is composed of multiple layers which are used to separate different elements of the document. The layers are stacked on top of each other, and depending on the order, determine the appearance of the final document.
Specialty imaging technology that creates effects on printed documents has been developed. Examples of specialty imaging effects include Xerox's GlossMark® printing (GM) in which text or an image is printed in a way that the content is not visible in straight-on view, but becomes visible as gloss under inclined illumination, infrared (IR) marking for marks, which are only visible with an IR camera under illumination with IR light, ultra violet (UV) marks, which are visible when illuminated with UV light, and correlation marks (CO), which are visible with specific transparency grids. These techniques rely entirely on software and are available as add-ons for work flow management products and the like. Some of these products are dedicated to text elements with the usage of specific fonts or patterns, and some other products to graphic elements with a dedicated user interface.
The management of layers within a document is very well known in graphical design applications, and is feasible with tools such as Adobe® Photoshop® technology. With this tool, a graphical designer can manipulate layers to obtain specific visual effects on the overall visual depiction by manipulating the overlapping properties of individual graphical elements (such as text or images). These effects are obtained by the combination of several layer features including the alignment of layer elements in which every element should positioned in relation to the other layer elements in order to provide the expected visual aspect; the properties of each layer, such as opacity, in order to see the layers underneath; and the blending mode, which describes how layers interact with layers below them, like layer pixel subtraction or multiplication, in order to create a specific effect. For example, two individual layers may be combined, with each layer containing a single image, such as a scenic image and a border image. When the layers are combined to form a new layer, the resulting layer contains an image that resembles the images in both individual layers.
To create such an effect entails manual set up of the properties by a user. It is possible to write scripts that can manage the content of each layer automatically according to the content of the layer. For example, one Adobe® Photoshop® script is entitled “Automatic layer alignment and blending.” With this script, a graphical designer can use a stack of photos of the same view from the same viewpoint where each picture has a random disruptive element, such as tourists in front of monument. With this stack of photos, the script searches for every visual photo region that is not present on the majority of layers and hides them. The resulting output from the script is a full picture of the monument without any tourists.
Another layer manipulation tool is Xerox's HighLight Color™ system, which uses PDF layers to represent a document. The goal of this technology is to highlight specific words in a print ready file by coloring its bounding box background. Words are found automatically and classified according to their grammatical and semantic type. Each type is represented by a specific color. In order to avoid overlapping of different colors when a word has several types and to give a high level of freedom to the end user, each type is painted on a specific layer. After the conversion from regular print ready file into a color highlighted PDF, the end user has the possibility to make each layer visible or invisible in order to highlight specific word types.
The layers in the HighLight Color™ system are used for visual impact, but the creation of these layers is completely automatic and requires alignment between them. Each highlighting layer has to be well aligned with the text layer in order to give the impression of word highlighting.
In present systems, the actual usage of layers in a document is passive. The layers provide useful visual feedback as soon as they are set and parameterized, but they do not drive other instructions for later processing. These software packages are dedicated to specific usages, text or graphics, and work mainly as independent applications with difficult learning curves. Typically, the designer has to switch between different applications by manually extracting the part of the document he wants to process and by incorporating it back into the original document. This is time-consuming and inefficient.